All posts tagged Charts

U.S. employers added 321,000 jobs in November, the best single month of job growth since January 2012. Revisions to October and September showed that another 44,000 more jobs were added than previous estimates showed. Here are 10 charts that break down the latest employment report. Read More »

The U.S. economy added 248,000 jobs in September, while a separate survey showed that the unemployment rate dropped to a new six-year low, the Labor Department reported on Friday. Here is a breakdown of the jobs report in 12 charts. Read More »

–Manufacturing Downside:Felix Salmon looks at the downside of manufacturing returning to the U.S. ” All of which means that there are two enormous problems with the story that manufacturing is returning to the US. That might be true, but (a) it’s not creating many jobs, and (b) the jobs it is creating are not the good jobs which people want to have for many years. Instead, they pay $15ish per hour, which is what teenage babysitters make in New York. Once upon a time, in the halcyon 1950s and 1960s, a man could have a blue-collar factory job and make enough money to support a whole family. Those days are over now, but they echo still in the dreams of manufacturing returning to the U.S. The idea is that were that to happen, good jobs would magically be created. Where the reality is that manufacturing jobs are not good jobs any more: you’re better off working in retail, whether you’re in the US or in China. And you don’t need to spend unpaid years in college learning technical skills to get a retail job.”

–QE Unintended Consequences:Greg Ip looks at the unintended consequences of monetary policy. ” QE can reduce bond yields two ways. First, it can signal that the Fed is serious about keeping short-term rates lower for longer. In our above example, investors may expect T-bills to yield 2% next year, instead of 4%. This should lower bond yields. Second, by reducing the supply of long-term bonds, it can force investors who want long-duration assets to accept a lower return on the smaller supply of those still available. This reduces the term premium. Investors have indeed moved out the date at which they expect the Fed to tighten, but that’s mostly because the Fed says it won’t raise rates until 2015 at the earliest. QE’s much more noticeable effect has been on the term premium, which Fed staff reckon has fallen to minus 80 basis points, near an all-time low. Until I read Mr Stein’s speech, I didn’t think any of this mattered much. Whether yields were low because of sanguine expectations of Fed tightening or because of a negative term premium, the impact on borrowing and consumption was the same. And indeed, the Fed’s own macroeconomic model, FRB/US, makes the same assumption. Mr Stein demolishes that illusion.”

–Copyrights:Virginia Postrel presents a free-market fix for copyright the system. ” Even as digital technology has made reproducing, remixing and repurposing creative works easier — with potentially enormous benefits for consumers and producers of new works — the monopoly privileges of copyright have expanded. The result is a bizarre combination of rampant copyright violations, frequent encroachment on legitimate fair use, suppression of new technologies and business models, and the ever-present threat of draconian penalties.”

Behind the monthly jobs numbers are millions of individual movements: People finding jobs and losing them, retiring and graduating. Together, those movements help reveal the underlying state of the labor market.

–End of Growth?:Martin Wolf looks at research on slowing growth. “For almost two centuries, today’s high-income countries enjoyed waves of innovation that made them both far more prosperous than before and far more powerful than everybody else. This was the world of the American dream and American exceptionalism. Now innovation is slow and economic catch-up fast. The elites of the high-income countries quite like this new world. The rest of their population like it vastly less. Get used to this. It will not change.”

–World Economy:Timothy Taylor posts some charts showing the relative sizes of world economies. “Of course, comparisons across countries don’t take population differences into account. As a final test, form a mental picture of what per capita GDP or per capita GDP per worker would look like for 2010. Again, it’s no shock to see the U.S. economy near the top of the list (although Norway, not shown here, is actually a little higher in both categories). At least to me, it is a modest surprise to see the western European countries outranking Japan so decisively, and a bigger surprise to see that South Korea is now so close behind Japan. Mexico considerably exceeds Brazil, with both Latin American countries lagging behind eastern Europe. And China remains quite poor on a per capita basis. As the BLS reports: “Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the United States was approximately six times larger than the GDP per capita in China.” Of course, this also suggests that China has the potential, with appropriate policies, for at least several decades more of very rapid economic growth.”

–Trinket Hub:Robert Smith wonders why New York became a hub for selling inexpensive trinkets. ” We ran into a Nigerian businesswoman in a cheap perfume store in the area and asked her. Kemi Alao was buying for her boutique, Lasting Impressions, in the town of Jos. She said it’s hard to send money electronically from Nigeria and make sure you are getting what you paid for. Even when she flew directly to China, she said, she found that she couldn’t trust the quality. Alao says it’s much easier to bring cash and some empty suitcases to New York and buy stuff in person. That way you can tell if merchandise is flawed or counterfeit. And you can look people in the eye when you do business. For buyers like Alao, New York City makes logical sense as a trinket hub. It’s easy to get to this city from the rest of the world. And once you get here, everything is close together. Alao can’t drive between warehouses in New Jersey. In Manhattan, she can walk a couple of blocks and see hundreds of different stores. The more customers, the more stores pop up. And the more stores, the better the selection.” Read More »

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